In the new version 1.2.7 of Related Posts Thumbnails plugin there is an option to select output style. By default it will be same as in previous versions – based on blocks. You can now select the version, based on “List” and you can also turn off plugin CSS for this version completely. This is for more advanced users who wish to customize output as they desire.

Also List style produces clean output, without HTML errors, and this may be an alternative for users with complex theme design, who experienced overlapping effects with Blocks output.

Improved plugin performance with high number of posts. Database request was altered and plugin performance improved. So now on my local machine for 3k posts it executed for 0.017 sec in average, compared to before 0.2 sec.

PHP configuration allow_url_fopen is taken into account. Some PHP configuration always returned default thumbnails, so now this option is checked.

Added start date to exclude old posts

Fixed display on pages with plugin setting for not single only.

Separated categories – which are displayed amoung thumbnails and on which thumbnails are displayed.

Random relation, for random posts display. It means you can set no relation at all to show any posts, not just with similar tags or categories.

Generate Post Thumbnails plugin was improved (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/generate-post-thumbnails/) and now it supports different methods of uploading externally hosted images on server depending on server configuration. Some configurations (allow_url_fopen is Off) didn’t work before and created empty images. This version should fix this. Also it supports relative paths.